


How to Have Fun in 140 Characters or Less

by Ellimac



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Fusion, episode: Too Short to Ride, shameless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7543282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellimac/pseuds/Ellimac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night after their day at Funland, Peridot tries out her newfound powers, and Amethyst helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Have Fun in 140 Characters or Less

Peridot sat on the beach in the middle of the night, tablet hovering before her. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on typing. Every now and then she shook her head and deleted what she’d written so far.

Finally, she threw up her hands in defeat.

“How am I supposed to fit today into 140 characters? _How_?” she demanded of no one.

“Dude, just use more than one cheep,” came the answer from behind her.

She jumped up and turned, startled, and the tablet moved with her, too quickly for the newcomer to react. It smacked into her head just as Peridot said, “Amethyst! I didn’t know you were—”

She put her hands to her mouth as Amethyst fell to the ground. “Ohmygosh! I’m so sorry, Amethyst! Are you okay?”

Amethyst sat up, rubbing her head. “Jeez,” she said. “I came out here to tell you something, but if you’re just gonna assault me…”

“It was an accident!” Peridot flailed her hands, causing the tablet to drift dangerously close to Amethyst’s head again. She let it drop into the sand, horrified that she might cause another accident. And then she saw that Amethyst was laughing.

“I’m kidding, Per,” Amethyst said. “It didn’t even hurt. By the way, how come you’re not at the barn? I went there first, but Lapis said she hasn’t seen you all day.”

“Oh.” Peridot picked the tablet up, with her hands this time. “Lazuli told me that if I was going to play one more Camp Pining Hearts episode, she was going to, and I quote, ‘make you _wish_ you were trapped in a fusion at the bottom of the ocean, Peridot.’”

Amethyst laughed. “Classic Lapis. So you’re just hanging out on the beach?”

“Steven told me I was cheeping too loudly and he couldn’t sleep,” Peridot said. She glanced aside and muttered, “I wasn’t even that loud.”

“You totally were,” Amethyst said. “No one could sleep with the way you keep muttering to yourself about how many followers you have, or exactly how many characters you have left and the ‘optimum way to maximize their efficacy.’” She made air-quotes around the words.

Peridot scowled. “I can’t possibly condense today into a single cheep. This is ridiculous. 140 characters isn’t nearly enough.”

“Use more than one,” Amethyst said. “No one’s going to care. People do it all the time. Here, gimme that thing, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

She made a grab for the tablet, but Peridot threw it high up into the air, higher than either of them could reach. Amethyst looked up, then turned back to Peridot and grinned.

“Okay, or don’t,” she said. “You can bring it back down. I’m not gonna take it again.”

Peridot squinted, but let the tablet drift slowly back into her hands. True to her word, Amethyst didn’t try to reach for it, and Peridot went back to attempting to compose a cheep.

“You said you came out here to tell me something,” Peridot said, looking sideways at Amethyst. “What is it?”

“Oh, yeah, that,” Amethyst said. She sat back in the sand and grinned up at Peridot. “I figured out a way for you to get on the roller coaster without needing to shapeshift.”

“Really?” Peridot nearly dropped her tablet. “How?”

Amethyst reached a hand up, inviting Peridot to join her on the sand. “Fuse with me. We’ll definitely be tall enough then.”

Peridot’s mouth dropped open. “Fuse? With _you_? But… but how can I even… if I can’t shapeshift, why would I be able to fuse?” She shook her head. “No. It would never work. But thanks for trying, Amethyst.”

Amethyst rolled her eyes. “Uh, it doesn’t count as trying if we haven’t actually _tried_ , P-dot.”

Peridot crossed her arms and scowled. “We’ve already established it’s impossible, so I don’t see the point.”

“We haven’t established anything. Come on, what’s the harm?” Amethyst got to her feet and held out her hand for Peridot again. “Even if we don’t fuse, there’s still a benefit to all this.”

Peridot glared at her suspiciously. “What?”

Amethyst grinned and wiggled her eyebrows. “You get to dance with me.”

Peridot blushed. That was a pretty compelling argument. Dancing with Amethyst would be a lot easier than dancing with Garnet, given the similarity of their heights, and it would probably be fun, too. Except… she looked around. “We’re alone here, right?”

Amethyst laughed. “No one’s going to see you dance.”

Her hand was still out for Peridot to take. Peridot stared at it for a moment longer, then stuck the tablet back on her arm and grabbed Amethyst’s hand.

Amethyst let out a whoop and tugged Peridot’s arm so hard that Peridot fell forward and had to catch herself against Amethyst’s chest. She looked up at her. She had never been this close to Amethyst before. For that matter, she had never been this close to _anyone_.

“This reminds me of Camp Pining Hearts,” she said.

Amethyst burst out laughing. “Are you serious? You _are_ serious. How is this like Camp Pining Hearts?”

“The scene in season 3 where Pamela trips over a tree root and she’s about to fall and Priscilla catches her and then they look at each other just like this and then they…”

Then they do that thing with their lips that Steven didn’t want to explain. But now Peridot found herself not wanting to explain, either.

Amethyst’s eyes were half-lidded, and her smile was small and playful. “Then they what?”

“They do the thing,” Peridot said. Her blush was back. “With their lips.”

There was a long pause.

“Let’s just get on with fusion, okay?” Peridot said, so quickly her words almost ran together.

“Fine by me,” Amethyst said, and grabbed Peridot’s other hand.

The next thing Peridot knew, they were twirling in circles. She held onto Amethyst’s hands for dear life.

“Is this how you normally fuse?” she said, a little loudly as Amethyst spun them faster and faster.

“You just gotta go with the flow,” Amethyst replied.

Peridot didn’t feel like going with the flow. In fact, she felt like throwing up, and that was a concept that Amethyst had only introduced her to a few days ago.

“This isn’t working,” she shouted.

Amethyst stopped abruptly, and Peridot crumpled into a heap. She didn’t let go of Amethyst’s hands, though.

“You okay?” Amethyst said.

“I just need to catch my breath,” Peridot mumbled.

Amethyst crouched next to her. “Dude, you’re a gem. You don’t need to breathe.”

Peridot didn’t answer her. A few moments later, she got back to her feet.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try this again.”

This time, Amethyst let Peridot take the lead. This was all well and good in theory, but Peridot didn’t actually know how to dance, so they wound up shuffling awkwardly in circles.

“Per-Bear,” Amethyst said eventually, “this isn’t going to work, either.”

Peridot stopped, her cheeks coloring. “I told you. I can’t fuse.”

“You can,” Amethyst insisted. “You just gotta do it right. Like I said,” she added, fluidly moving her shoulders in a wave, “you gotta go with the flow.”

She held the last syllable for a few seconds. Her mouth had a nice shape to it, Peridot thought.

“I don’t know how,” Peridot said.

“Do what comes naturally,” Amethyst suggested.

“Dancing doesn’t come naturally to me.”

“Dancing comes naturally to everyone,” Amethyst said firmly. “Just move with me.”

She started dancing again, this time without the rapid spinning. She moved so smoothly that Peridot, no matter what she did, felt awkward and clumsy in comparison. Amethyst moved like she was made of liquid; Peridot moved like she was made of stiff plastic.

Amethyst noticed, and stopped moving. “Hey. You moved that tablet pretty well, huh?”

Peridot’s brow wrinkled. “Yes…”

“And those rings? You moved those pretty gracefully, too.”

“Yes, but I don’t see—”

Amethyst put a finger to her lips and looked into her eyes. It was an intense look, like Amethyst was gazing into her very soul. “Be the tablet,” she said seriously. “Be the rings. Move yourself like you move metal.”

In other circumstances, Peridot might have told Amethyst that this was a ridiculous idea. That she couldn’t move herself like that, because she wasn’t made of metal. That the very idea of applying her powers to herself was preposterous.

Right now, though, under the light of the moon, alone with Amethyst on the beach, it seemed to Peridot like it just might work.

She closed her eyes. “Okay. I’m ready.”

It was closing her eyes, oddly, that seemed to make all the difference. When she couldn’t see Amethyst, she had to rely on what she felt her doing, which meant she couldn’t mimic her. She tried to picture herself, tried to imagine moving her arms with an external force, moving her legs in time with Amethyst’s steps, moving her body like she moved the tablet.

In the end, she didn’t even notice when they fused. She simply opened her eyes and found herself looking down at a new body, with new eyes, and a mind made up of both Peridot and Amethyst.

 “It worked!” she shouted. She tossed her hands up in the air, and noticed that the tablet was still attached to one of them. She held her other hand out, and the tablet ripped itself from the Velcro and zipped into her open palm.

She started to laugh. Anyone listening might have called it a maniacal laugh; she just liked the sound of it. She hovered the tablet above her head, then almost dropped it as she remembered with a gasp what she was here for.

“Funland! The roller coaster!”

She started to run in the direction of Funland. But before she had even left the beach, she slowed. She could see from here that the lights were off, and the roller coaster wasn’t running.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s closed. It’s the middle of the night.”

She sat down with a sigh and picked up the tablet again. She had forgotten in all the excitement that Peridot was still trying to compose a cheep to encapsulate the excitement of the day.

She hesitated. Would it be right, to cheep on Peridot’s account? Of course it would. Peridot was part of her, after all.

She tapped out a quick message and posted it. Then she set the tablet back on the sand and lay down next to it.

“I guess there are other fun things to do as a fusion,” she said. “Like stargazing. Garnet said that was fun.”

She stared up at the sky. It made sense, for the first time, when Garnet had said she wasn’t alone. True, she had one body, but it was impossible to feel alone when you were two gems in one.

After a while, she closed her eyes. Peridot had never slept before coming to Earth, but Amethyst did it all the time, and right now it seemed like a pretty nice idea. Anything seemed like a good idea to do with herself—with both Peridot and Amethyst along for the ride.

In a moment, the only thing making noise on the beach was the faint buzz of the tablet as it displayed the last cheep on Peridot’s account. _Nothing beats spending all day with my bffs. Except spending all night AS my bff. (Big Friend Forever.) As Amethyst would say, peace out._


End file.
